Big Daddy

Twenty years ago, when he was a mere corporal in the King's African Rifles, Idi Amin Dada had a vision that told him some day he would be ruler of all Uganda. It was an accurate prediction. Last month General Amin, now 44, celebrated the first anniversary of his accession to Uganda's presidency after leading a coup that ousted the demagogic Milton Obote. There was a massive parade through the streets of Kampala, Uganda's capital, which featured a band in kilts and busbies marching to the skirl of bagpipes and sinuous dances by women from the Karamoja area dressed in colorful bras and wood-bark skirts. In all, more than 100,000 celebrating Ugandans, representing most of the nation's 39 tribes and four regions, gathered to pay tribute to the mercurial leader who is familiarly known to his people as "Big Daddy."

Daddy is big indeed. A former heavyweight champion of Uganda --he retired undefeated in 1960--Amin packs about 240 Ibs. on his chunky 6-ft. 3-in. frame. He is also not your ordinary, everyday military dictator. A devout Moslem who detests hashish and miniskirts with equal fervor, he has four wives, three of whom take turns acting as official hostesses at presidential tea parties in Kampala. On Uganda's hotter days, Amin is likely to show up at hotel pools clad only in a pair of faded blue shorts.

Amiable and approachable, he frequently answers his own phone in the President's office, spends hours dispensing off-the-cuff advice to callers with problems. Big Daddy lives modestly enough, but he does have a $3,000,000 Israeli-built personal jet, which he has used to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, among other trips. He rockets around Kampala at breakneck speed in his own Jeep. Last year a military policeman warned him against speeding; Amin cheerfully accepted the reprimand. ''It just goes to show," he said, "that I am not above the law."

Rough Justice. In Uganda, Amin is the law, and he is clearly in no hurry to return Uganda to civilian rule. Currently, all Cabinet members are forced to accept commissions as junior officers in the army, which handily makes them subject to courts-martial in cases of malfeasance. Amin, though, pays relatively little attention to his Cabinet. Much of the nation's business is conducted at barazas--informal, impromptu powwows at which Big Daddy sits down with tribesmen, hears their complaints and dispenses rough justice.

Amin's methods have endeared him to the people, but they have done nothing to solve Uganda's vast economic problems, which he characteristically blames on the "corruption" of Obote's regime. In fact, Amin has turned a blind eye to military spending and has allowed the army to run up mammoth bills on guns, trucks and other expensive hardware. Uganda has substantial untapped resources of iron and copper, but agriculture is the principal business. Crop prices (principally for coffee, cotton and tea) have not kept pace with inflationary living costs, and last year Uganda's foreign exchange reserves fell from $44.8 million to $25 million. To help the faltering economy, Amin was forced to borrow -L-10 million from Britain and impose strict import and trade controls.

Partly to divert attention from Uganda's growing financial problems, Amin has in the past threatened to invade neighboring Tanzania, which angered him by offering ex-President Obote shelter. He has also taken crowd-pleasing steps like putting economic pressure on the country's 80,000 Asians, who control most of its small businesses. If Big Daddy is unable to bolster Uganda's sagging economy, however, there is a chance that some day he might meet an unspecified "doom," which was also foretold in that long-ago vision.

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